Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [964]
Pulitzer riled New York society, but Hearst appalled it, and backs turned when the blond, racily dressed six-footer strode into the Metropolitan Club. He didn’t care. Nor did his phenomenal expenses trouble him overly, his pockets being far deeper than his debts. Besides, the Journal’s circulation shot up to 430,000 within a year, leaping past the Herald, Sun, Tribune, and Times. The vigorous young Hearst, who worked in his office late into the evening, was clearly gaining on Pulitzer, now a half-blind nervous wreck, running his operations from his yacht while cruising the world in a search for quiet harbors.
Much of the Journal’s success stemmed from Hearst’s support for the Cuban rebellion—like Pulitzer’s, a mix of conviction and calculation—and his campaign slipped steadily away from conventional standards of truth in journalism. Hearst stirred fact with fiction and poured the resulting prose into a mold of pure melodrama, one that played explosively with the gender conventions of his culture. For the Journal, the heart of the matter was that villainous Spaniards were brutalizing noble Cubans, and the heart of the heart of the matter was that lustful Spanish brutes were ravishing pure Cuban women.
In February 1897 Richard Harding Davis, a romantic-fiction writer turned war correspondent, filed a dispatch reporting that Spanish police had boarded a U.S. vessel bound from Havana to Tampa and strip-searched three female Cuban passengers thought to be carrying messages to insurgent leaders in New York City. Next to this inflammatory text Hearst placed an incendiary image: a half-page drawing, done in distant Manhattan by Frederic Remington, showing one of the women, naked, surrounded by Spanish officers. A five-column screamer headline demanded: “Does Our Flag Protect Women?” The issue sold nearly a million copies. That the women had in fact been searched by matrons, as the World soon discovered and trumpeted, did nothing to still the uproar.
Next Hearst claimed that an imprisoned eighteen-year-old Cuban girl, Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros (known as Miss Cisneros in the States), had been jailed for trying to defend her honor against the advances of “a beast in uniform.” Hearst launched a campaign to free Evangelina from jail, where the molested maiden with her “white face, young, pure and beautiful,” languished “among the most depraved Negresses of Havana.” (Few Americans realized that in some areas four-fifths of the guerrilla forces were of African descent, and the yellow press did little to enlighten them.)
Hearst arranged a jailbreak, brought Cisneros to New York, met her in the harbor on his steam launch, introduced her to hundreds of dignitaries at a Delmonico’s reception, and presented her to the masses at Madison Square Garden, accompanied by searchlights, fireworks, and bands. The affair was so compellingly staged that the president, who had canceled his Journal subscription in disgust at its reportage, felt obliged to invite the Cuban Joan of Arc to the White House.
Faced with Hearst’s triumphs, Pulitzer abandoned restraint. World reporters began recounting ghastly horror stories—some true, many fraudulent. (“Blood on the roadsides, blood in the fields, blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood!”) The two papers whipped themselves into a competitive frenzy—matching the fervor of the old railroad wars, with text, not trackage, the product—and the Associated Press carried the copy to the country. Increasingly both editors began to push for war.
War eluded them, in part because the president, unlike armchair warriors Hearst and Roosevelt, was old enough to remember the carnage of the Qvil War. When Spain made conciliatory gestures, McKinley responded positively (to the fury of Roosevelt, who declared the president had the backbone of a chocolate eclair). In addition, the